Top mandarin Greg Moriarty has broken his silence on the full extent of how the robodebt scandal is haunting the APS.
Embattled public servant Kathryn Campbell is facing the music with confirmation she will be suspended without pay, and the few things her current boss has to say about the fiasco make it clear he thinks the APS showed poor form in the evolution of the illegal scheme.
On the same day Campbell was said to have been stood down from her SES Band 3 role at the Department of Defence, Greg Moriarty was sharing leadership insights with a group of emerging APS talent at 121 Marcus Clarke Street.
“The issue of leadership in the public service, it is one that’s contemporary,” Moriarty said.
“We are dealing, I think, with a very fundamental crisis in the public service at the moment around robodebt and how we respond to that.
“We also have some really pressing domestic challenges in an international environment where our interests are hard to pursue. What I’m worried about is the international trend. I think genuinely our strategic circumstances are deteriorating, and that will have challenges for our country.”
The Defence secretary went on to observe that the next few decades would require APS leaders who could adapt to changing environments, collaborate better and generate statecraft unlike ever before.
He said these characteristics were a necessity because of the disinformation threats posed domestically and overseas, and because trust between citizens and their governments was so vulnerable.
“Confidence in government, confidence in our institutions is being being questioned or being undermined and so leadership and the quality of leadership is going to be even more important,” Moriarty said.
“I think everybody has a role to play in reinvigorating the public service and reforming it and supporting the work of the leadership. But owning it is really important.”
Campbell, a robodebt architect and former Department of Human Service secretary, has been on leave from her $900,000 AUKUS taskforce adviser job for a fortnight. She took her leave at about the time Catherine Holmes delivered her royal commission report, including a sealed section of parties recommended to disciplinary and criminal referral based on adverse findings.
Commenting on moves by the new government on the advice of top bureaucrats to install stewardship as a sixth APS value, Moriarty said the law reform was appropriate. He added that he hoped stewardship would permeate through all levels of the service and strike at the heart of the ‘one APS’ philosophy.
“Stewardship has been a focus of some recent discussions, and there’s been a lot of attention on that from the new Public Service commissioner [Gordon de Brouwer] and the secretary of PM&C,” Moriarty said.
“In my time, it’s been even more necessary, even at more junior levels to take a whole-of-government view. If you’re trying to drive an agenda, and you are just prosecuting your agency or your department’s perspective, then you’re doing a disservice to the service, but you’re also doing a disservice to your own agency.”
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